Inside Star Citizen: Mission Statement 3.24

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   the upcoming Alpha 324 has a variety of life in the verse changing aspects including the personal persistent hangers freight elevators and the next step forward in physicalized inventory but with these changes come a new era in cargo specific Mission content different than the commodity runs you might be used to we spoke in depth about this in our recent making missions 2 episode of Star Citizen live which you should check out if you haven't already you're at Nick did great and on this week's ISC they're joined by Elliot and yet another Nick to show you these new cargo missions and reintroduce us to the long mentioned Blockade Runner Global event so how many of these do you think you've done at this point uh videos for you I don't know over 20 you still like doing them yeah and this is the third

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   one so I've I guess I've done two before this this will be my second what was your question one also block G oner this your first one mhm you nervous tiny bit I got easier or harder easier when I first started I was focused too much on the camera and that was making me think too much when there was a camera pointed at you it's still it's still a little bit different than just speaking to people but I tried to look at you or thought that the camera was someone it made it easier because it felt like I was just talking to someone instead of looking at a machine trying to be perfect so you stop trying to be perfect yeah pretty much I'm just like that should have been easy for you until the this sector has been resolved civilians are advised to avoid engaging

3. 00:01:35

   in space travel Blockade Runner is an event that focuses on cargo hauling and space combat the inhabitants of a station ask for Aid the bad guys have blockaded one of these stations and the citizens there need help to get certain supplies from outside to go back in the idea with it is that you would have someone who flies a cargo ship and loads up full of cargo and then have a bunch of escort ships that help fight them however the way they now have to get the cargo means they have to actually go and extract it from Pirates who have taken it from the station we wanted to make a cargo based event because a lot of our current events are really heavy on

4. 00:02:23

   combat and cargo's been kind of underutilized on the global event scene and we thought it would be fun to work that into our usual design the response we saw from Xeno fret when we first put Xeno fret out we really liked when we saw players working together in kind of like a Dunkirk type moment where one person had pulled up just open the ramp couple of people had cleared the wreck already and then they're all just throwing cargo into someone's the back of someone ship they don't know this person they've not talked to them but everyone understands their role in this space they've created and there's people who are flying above sort of also protecting against the waves of Ninetails that were coming to the wreck and it was just this beautiful mix of people who just all kind of knew exactly what role they fit into and asked no questions and just got the job

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   done we wanted to recreate that feeling in its own [Music] event so the flow of Blockade Runner is when you start the mission you will receive marker points of potential sites where a pirate could be that has stolen cargo from the station that's requesting its return a hostile enemy Force has attacked one of the elos throughout Stanton and they've stolen a great deal of Zeta pomide from it this Zeta prolids been shipped out it's being carried away and the remainder of the enemy Force has stayed behind surrounding the ELO in a blockade it's up to players of the verse to chase down these enemy ships that contain the stolen material defeat them in combat reclaim the material either via the use of distortion weapons to

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   make sure you get every piece of cargo that's on board the ship or via killing it and maybe getting less but you run less of the risk of dying yourself once they do recover the stolen material from the ships scattered throughout space they'll have to make their way past the blockade and return it to the Leo there will be ships flying around that you have to actually disable while trying to land or else you could lose all of your cargo either way their goal is to land safely at the ELO with the stolen material on and once they have that they get to use our fancy new cargo elevator mechanic to return the stolen cargo to the station the reward for blockade is based off of uh participation there will be similar to Xena fret there will be a bar that fills up with contribution and every time that bar kind of ticks over

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   you'll get a payment and then you'll get a big chunk at the end when all of the seu amount of cargo has been retrieved back to the station so to get all of the cargo I I'd recommend using Distortion weapons and boarding the ship this way you can ensure that you get everything out of the cargo hold whereas if you do it the other way you know you go from this 100% sort of loop to maybe 30% there's going to be a big difference to encourage a different type of gameplay that players aren't really used to playing in our game I think a lot of the game Loops in our game are a bit drawn out and I I like to think that you can get into the action pretty quick with this and it's a relatively tight game Loop all things considering I hope people will will be able to jump in and out of it as they see fit and have a good time in addition to Blockade Runner

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   we're also adding uh a bunch of hauling missions uh that also utilize the freight elevator and instance hangers we're going to get with the introduction of freight elevators we can now make missions that we were never able to make before up until now we haven't really had any missions which allow you to use your cargo grid you want have to go to various different parts of a station or find a ground station to get your land vehicle you'll be able to get everything you need for your trip organized one place now I can just go to my hanger and there's an asop terminal in there and I can watch my ship go down and come up and I can have all my boxes out the ability it gives me to build the missions that I love is insane so for me as an economy designer freight elevators means that I can reward players for new game loops and

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   different types of activity that they haven't been able to fully play before such as loading and unloading your cargo figuring out logistics and actually allowing players to monetize that effort and get suitable reward for it so the more time and effort that it takes to use the freight elevators and do the Hing missions effectively the more opportunities I have as an economy designer to find the appropriate rewards for players for that game Loop and I don't want to see any Reddit threads on the rewards for these missions cuz at the time of filming we're still weeks away that means the numbers you see in this episode aren't the real numbers don't go to Reddit give this guy a break they'll be real by the time the thing comes out you might be thinking well we've been moving boxes for a few years now

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    those delivery missions already exist what makes cargo hauling missions so special well in cargo hauling missions we're actually allowing you to move real commodity containers with real value through the verse you're not stuck with one seu boxes if you asked to move 400 seu those will actually be intelligently packed by the system into different container sizes which means you'll be able to load them up on your cargo grids for your cargo ships the way you've always wanted to organize them these missions will handle high volume of caro these missions are built for people who are going to own a caterpillar people who are going to own a whole sea these uh mimicking a logistical framework that's going to be needed in you know a system a universe this big to transport the goods to and

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    from different locations let me give you some examples you find a mission where a few different outposts on the surface of hon have mined some iron and you've got to bring it up to lville where then it can be transported further from there so you go to each of these outposts you land at that location and there in the warehouse of that Outpost those containers will be waiting for you where you can call it up through the freight elevator you load it up into your ship and then you figure out what the next location is and the next location and the next location you can basically do those in any order you like you'll have single pickup single drop off so this could be picking up from the Leos around at cor uh the lrange points for example and taking it

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    to Area 18 or to Bim point um the station above then you'll have a multi-p pickup and a singular drop off and then the opposite of that which is singular pickup to multi- drop off could be the complete opposite where you go from a Hurston DC to two other outposts to delivering Goods it also lets us do a first static setup of what is being called star Sim where we can test out the flow and then actually make the dynamic side of it work work where we can balance it based off of the needs and wants of the actual locations the work that I was involved with the missions with yurit was to use the EVR algorithm that I created to make sure that all of the effort that you put

13. 00:09:46

    in has a commenor reward EVR stands for effort versus reward the EVR algorithm is a general balancing algorithm we've developed that takes into account the time and the difficulty of what you're doing and it gives you a reward that is appropriate for that so if you do something that takes a long time but isn't very difficult or if you do something that takes a short time but is very difficult you're going to get appropriately rewarded so obviously this kind of thing effort and reward isn't A New Concept it's been around since the beginning of computer games but as the economy team moves forwards and we work on all of the exciting new features that are coming out we're really happy to be able to bring this kind of coherent approach to the enti entire game economy in the end cargo hauling

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    missions aren't about how good you are at shooting the bad guys it's about figuring out which Halls the universe needs and ultimately it's about having fun delivering some boxes thanks for watching everybody so what did we learn this week well hopefully that the cargo missions aim to provide a more involved and deliberate experience than the commodity one you might be used to that the Blockade Runner will benefit from boarding tactics more than simply just blowing things up and that while your everyday life in the verse certainly changes in Alpha 324 it will continue to evolve in the subsequent 4.0 and Beyond and if you'd like to learn even more about these cargo missions you can tune in to tomorrow Star Citizen live where the team will talk even more about the stuff you saw here for inside Star

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    Citizen I'm Jared hucke thanks for letting us share the people and process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week